How Zeros and Ones Win

The faculty of Engineering of
the Université Antonine is once again proving its love for challenges by
organizing a major competition in the world of Computer programming: The first
Université Antonine Programming Competition (UAPC) will take place in Baabda
campus this July 28. It follows a renowned international format organized by
the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). It is addressed for programming
students.

The Competition

25 students, registered in second
year or above, will be split in teams (1 to 3 students per team) and will
compete in the UAPC while using one computer only. During 5 hours, they will need
to solve up to 12 programming exercises inspired by Google, Facebook and NASA
tests. Every time an exercise is solved the team must raise a balloon, up until
the last exercise, for no one to know which team has first finished. Their
suggested solutions are tested by Judge, a server which allows teams to try as
many solutions as desired. Judge then executes their solutions, compares them
to the organizers’ predefined solution and evaluates their results, based on
speed, efficiency and analytical skills.

A 10-day boot camp has been scheduled
for the 25 participating students with international coach Abdelrahman el
Gamma, from Egypt, in order to give them a further push and help them write
complex algorithms, analyze quickly and think outside the box.

The Teams

Teams must be named and will
be required to attend a preparation session on Wednesday July 27th,
between 2 pm and 5 pm, in order to practice and get familiar with the material in
the presence of an international coach. They will also learn about of the related
rules and regulations. Amongst those rules is the prohibition during the
competition of smart phones and watches, USB keys, disks, e-books and any other
digital device. Only published reference books in original hardcopy format are
allowed. C, C++ and Java are the three programming languages approved during
this competition, as per ACM rules.

Only two teams will be declared
winners at the end of the competition and will be awarded cash money prizes and
most importantly, will represent the Université Antonine in the ACM-LCPC, the Lebanese
Collegiate Programming Competition, which takes place every year in a different
Lebanese University, where up to 20 teams compete. The LCPC saw the light in
2008 and has given the chance to many Lebanese students to reach the Arab
Competition (ACPC), a mandatory step to reach the International Competition
(ICPC).

The Club

The Université Antonine
created a club for programming students called the Programming Society, where
30 students get to practice their analytical thinking, ability to solve
problems quickly and efficiently, and work on their team skills. Through the
club, students become better prepared for the UAPC, LCPC, ACPC and ICPC,
competitions which are not only achievements by themselves, but also an
opportunity to get scouted by the biggest recruiting agencies in the industry who
always attend those competitions.

The Organizers

Elias Doumith, Bechara
Al-Bouna, Georges Bader, Chady Abou Jaoudé and Mohammad Nassar are the
people behind the UAPC preparations; they hope to give aspiring students a
better chance to make it in the field of 0 and 1. They are now preparing the 2nd
edition of UAPC.

The best of luck from the
organizers to all participants!

UAPC will be held at the main campus of Université Antonine in
Baadba, on Thursday 28 July 2016, from 9 am till 1 pm.